Happy Customers: Segmentation

Knowing how many of your customers are happy is a good place to start, but understanding why they are happy is invaluable. Often, happy and unhappy customers actually use the same product differently! Identifying the behaviors of happy customers and designing the product to lean into those is a powerful way to improve overall satisfaction.

The great news is that, thanks to your NPS survey, you know which customers are happy and unhappy. You can, and should, use this information to segment your customers the same way you use location, demographics, cohorts, etc.

Once you have segments for promoters and detractors, you can do many different kinds of analysis to compare how their behavior differs. For example, put together a table of all the features of your product and which of those features are used by each segment. In the following sample you can easily see a difference in product usage between promoters and detractors:

Promoters

Detractors

Feature 1

34%

20%

Feature 2

75%

17%

Feature 3

20%

80%

Feature 4

67%

50%

Feature 5

23%

25%

Once you have identified those differences, the next question is whether they are causes or effects. Do happy users use certain features because they are happy or does those features actually make them happy? The easiest way to do that is to run some tests! Experiment with ways to get your detractors to use the features that promoters love and see if it changes their perception.

This works well for features that are already available and hence have data behind them, but what about new features you are considering adding? We’ll cover that tomorrow!

Quote of the Day: “And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness…And this was most vexing of all.”, Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago